Book Review

The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects by Deborah Lutz

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Genre: Nonfiction

The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects is a very entertaining, accessible examination of the lives of the Brontë Siblings (most notably Anne, Emily, and Charlotte). Instead of being a linear biography, the book uses historical objects (for instance, a walking desk, a bracelet, and a dog collar) as entry points into the Brontë’s lives. This means that we get a sense of what the Brontës’ everyday lives might have been like, as well as a good sense of what their historical era was like, and how the world changed in the years right before their births through the period shortly after their deaths.

It’s no secret to The Bitchery that I love to rant about the Brontës. Jane Eyre is my desert island book. I can seriously credit Jane Eyre for a great deal of my values and ideals about how to live with a sense of pride and integrity in a hostile world. I hated Wuthering Heights ( A | BN | K | G | AB | Au | Scribd ) with a mad passion until I realized that it’s not a romance. Now I deeply admire it as a story about people who are driven mad by the boxes they are forced into – boxes that are defines by issues of gender, class, race, and upbringing. I haven’t even tackled the work of Anne Brontë yet (Agnes Grey ( A | BN | K | G | AB | Au | Scribd ), Tenant of Wildfield Hall ( A | BN | K | G | AB | Au | Scribd )) and I have a sneaky suspicion that she might turn out to be my favorite.

The Real Jane Austen
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The Brontë Cabinet uses the same structure as my favorite biography of Jane Austen, The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things by Paula Byrne. This structure has disadvantages and advantages. The disadvantage to this structure is that it presents individual, isolated moments of a life, not chronological detail. Sometimes you need to know the timeline of the major events in a person’s life, and these books don’t lay out the structure of their subject’s lives in that kind of detail.

However, organizing a biography around material objects does have some advantages. It makes the subjects much more relatable and it breaks up the story, which keeps it interesting. The amount of historical context broadens the appeal of the book. If you have any interest in Victorian history, you are bound to enjoy The Brontë Cabinet, even if you have minimal interest in the  Brontës themselves.

To give you a feel for what the book is like, I offer a few things I learned from it:

  • Pet kidnapping was a major criminal enterprise in Victorian London, and anyone who paid a ransom to get their dog back could expect more kidnappings in the future.
  • Charlotte Brontë wrote passionate letters to her best friend, Ellen. Victorian approaches to sexual identity and to same sex friendship were so different from our own that our current labels are difficult to apply to Victorian relationships. Regardless of whether or not their relationship was a physical one, Charlotte and Ellen clearly adored each other and considered each other to be soul mates. Charlotte considered (but decided against) marrying Ellen’s brother because the marriage would have caused Charlotte and Ellen to live in the same house.
  • If you are tired of having to buy greeting cards, blame the invention of penny postage, which made sending cards both affordable and wildly popular.
  • Because Ann and Charlotte both had periods of time in which they were away from home either for school or for employment, Emily took on a great deal of housework. She became adept at reading and writing while ironing and baking.
  • The Victorians took great comfort in the idea that people looked peaceful in death. They made art from their loved ones’ hair, buried letters with their loved ones (one woman buried a letter with the dead postman so he would deliver it to one of her deceased relatives) and eventually took photos of the dead for sentimental purposes. Two things ended the obsession with the dead body – germ theory, which made death seem less like an act of God and more like a mistake, and WWI, which left bodies looking not remotely peaceful.

 

Jane Eyre
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If you are interested in a comprehensive biography of the Brontë family, I can recommend The Brontës: Wild Genius on the Moors by Juliet Barker. My recommendation comes with an extremely significant caveat: I never got further than about chapter three of the book. The hardcover edition is 1184 pages long. From what I could tell, the book is well written, well-researched, and well-organized, but at 1184 pages you have to be REALLY committed to wanting to know every single detail of the Bronte family history. It’s not a saga of adventure. Stuff happened, but most of it was, “nobody washed their hands and they all died.” That’s a lot for 1184 pages, so I only recommend this book to the most hardcore of the Brontë fans.

The Brontë Cabinet is much more accessible and fun, though less detailed. It provides an entertaining and well-researched overview of what the Brontë sisters’ lives were like and what might have driven their art. It’s a quick read (it took me two days) and because it delves into Victorian culture in a broad sense, instead of keeping the focus on what the Brontës did on any specific date, it has a more general appeal. I was fascinated by all the details about everyday life – what dog collars looked like, how women viewed walking as an act of rebellion, what a woman’s needlework revealed about her, and what you can tell about a writer by looking at (and in) their writing desk. This book made the Brontës feel human and relatable.

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The Brontë Cabinet by Deborah Lutz

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  1. Tracey says:

    How splendid! Jane Eyre is my absolute favorite, too. I’ve read it multiple times and each time appreciate something new. I did a sermon a few years ago and researching the Brontes was terribly addictive. I am always touched by how different Charlotte’s real life was from her literary one.
    this book looks fascinating and I need it!

  2. Lucy Sheerman says:

    For me the romance novels I like go straight back to Jane Eyre. There’s something so compelling about the arrival of Rochester – you just know it is a scene that Bronte had in her head very vividly linked to her own need for wish fulfilment – and I love to read versions of it again and again when I’m reading new romances and to spot where other writers have been inspired by it too. Lutz’s book brilliantly explores how those kinds of compulsions inspired the Brontes.

  3. Melanie says:

    This sounds fascinating, and it’s available at my public library right now! I also found Juliet Barker’s exhaustive biography of the Brontes daunting. However, she also edited “The Brontes: A Life in Letters,” which has a chronological structure without going into so much detail; it’s about 400 pages long. If you want to read more about the Brontes without reading quite so much more about the Brontes, I recommend it.

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